Stefan Altenburger was born in 1968, grew up in Zurich, attended primary school and grammar school there and matriculated at the École supérieure d'arts appliqués in Vevey on Lake Geneva in 1987, where he studied photography until 1991. While still a student, he was commissioned by DU, the well-known Swiss cultural magazine, to take photographs for its planned issue “Brachland Berlin” (“Wasteland Berlin”). In 1990, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he traveled to Berlin, where he photographed such famous, yet at that time still inhospitable places as Alexanderplatz, Brandenburger Tor, Schlossplatz, Potsdamer Platz, as well as subway stations and underpasses, which in their anonymity and bleakness seem devoid of all culture in his photographs. Here space and time seem to stand still, drained of all life, while the chosen perspectives and the image details bring the plasticity of railings, stairs, grids, lamps, door canopies and building facades to the fore. Altenburger sees the city as the product of a proliferation of cultural decay and depicts it as a witness to the loss of identity and utopia.1

These extraordinary photographs, which show only a brief moment in Berlin's long history, do in a way anticipate his later documentary works for artists, galleries and museums. Thus, in this sense, it was not really a break when, a few years later, he decided to abandon his work as an artist in favor of purely documentary photography entirely at the service of the art world. Indeed, he had never wanted to be a supplier of meanings. The essential qualities of his photographs—laconicism, irritation, geometry, irony, hidden humor—were merely intended to inspire viewers to think about the difference between the essence and the appearance of things. In this sense, Altenburger is the ideal exhibition visitor and viewer of works of art and the perfect documentary photographer of the contemporary art scene and exhibition business. Everything that had made him stand out as an artist could be exploited in his new task. All his artistic intuition needed was a new, worthwhile purpose.

And because he succeeded in doing this from the very beginning, he now documents works of art and exhibitions by the most successful artists in the world's most famous museums and galleries. And this he does this with this extremely sensitive eye, which can quite literally look back on years of artistic training, not least under the influence of the dreamy, ironic charm of the electro-pop world. Altenburger also caused a sensation in the 1990s and early 2000s as a producer of electroclash music. Fans will never forget his legendary collaboration with Miss Kittin and their joint hit “Rippin Kittin” (2001), which even today hasn't lost anything of its languorous, casually cool melancholy.

Just how unobtrusively beautiful and precise Altenburger’s documentary photographs in fact are can be clearly seen, for example, in his images of Urs Fischer's sculptures, installations and exhibitions that were shown at the New Museum, New York (2009), the Brant Foundation, New York (2010), the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012), the Kunsthalle, Vienna (2012) and the MOCA, Los Angeles (2013). Here his highly objective and skilful way of capturing precisely what he sees makes Fischer's works seem especially present and alive in these images. He reveals their very essence, as though turning them inside out, breathes life and soul into them and makes their unusual materiality vibrate. But that is not all: in the spirit of his earlier photographs, he not only sets Fischer’s sculptures in a relationship to the viewer and the exhibition venue, but also lends the design elements of the architecture itself an unmistakable face. This is the reason why his photographic documentations of installations dismantled after the end of the exhibition can mutate into works of art themselves.

Stefan Altenburger's photographic works in the art scene are stylistically influential in much the same way as those of Anton Corbijn in the music scene, although his way of capturing things differs diametrically from that of the Dutchman. While Corbijn overly dramatizes his portraits and record covers in post-production, Altenburger is the absolute master of laconicism when it comes to photographing works of art. This is why he is actually much closer to the Jamaican-American photographer Percy Rainford (1901 – 1976), who according to Man Ray was one of the greatest photographers of the American art scene. Rainford began his career in the early 1930s in Manhattan as a photographer of paintings and sculptures for catalogues and art magazines. He later worked for the major museums in New York, including the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thanks to his technical skill and artistic empathy, he was also in high popular demand with artists. Marcel Duchamp, for example, commissioned him for some of his most important photographic works. In 1945 Rainford not only portrayed the artist in the guise of an 85-year-old (Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85) but in the same year also photographed the famous smoking wine bottle for the cover of the special Duchamp edition of the View magazine.2

Like Percy Rainford, Stefan Altenburger is a master of precision and restraint. He puts himself entirely at the service of the subject matter and does everything in his power to do photographic justice to the character and presence of a work of art.